A CASE FOR RECORDS
By HILARY JENKINSON
IT has long been a commonplace of depreciation to say that England possesses more valuable collections of historical documents than any other country, and displays more indifference to them. "En Angleterre tout est en désordre," says an eminent French critic: and the Times Literary Supplement quotes him.[32] Since the middle of last century the declared classes of public records in this country (those of the Central Government) have, it is true, had a settled habitation, a staff to look after them, and a good deal of attention from a small section of the public; also a considerable, though relatively small, number of publications has been devoted to them and some of the clamorous interests, the genealogist's, for example, fed if not sated. The same amount of good fortune, except by the hazard of their coming into the hands of an enthusiast, has not in many cases befallen the records belonging to local bodies; still less has it come to the enormous private collections originally accumulated in connection with the descent of real property, and now, since the invention of "short title," no longer in any demand for their primary purpose. If the public records of the past may in our day be considered to have found safety, it is still possible to witness in this country the unedifying spectacle of the museum or the rich collector buying up the pretty specimen from a collection of manorial records, while the remainder, of which it should form an integral part, after the lesser lights of the collecting world have taken gradual toll of it, goes without protest from any one to the tambourine-maker or the glue merchant. It is as though an anatomist, having exhumed his great-grandfather, should add to that injury the insult of preserving an interesting metacarpal in his cabinet, while he distributes the rest of the body to various colleagues, with remainder to the manufacturer of fertilisers: one is tempted to send science to blazes and wish the poor old gentleman might have been left intact, if useless, underground.
[32] November 27th, 1919.
I have spoken in this first paragraph of the unhappy state of the small collections in England because that state is an obvious and striking result of the same cause which has produced most of our mistakes in the preservation, sorting and editing of documents in the past; because the distinction at present existing between the public and the private collections is so symptomatic of our worst failure in this field: in effect, in all these years during which historical documents have met with a certain amount of appreciation, it has apparently never occurred to us to make definite search for the essential features common to all records, high or low, and to apply to all records a treatment based on the examination of those features. But the most interesting archive question of the present time seems to me to be the question of the records we ourselves are producing. If our shortcomings as owners of archives have affected adversely our treatment of what the past has left to us, are they not capable of doing quite as much harm to that which we ourselves are to bequeath to the future? And, further, if England, owing to its wealth of records, provides a particularly large number of examples of things to be avoided, is it not possible that the application of the warning derived from these may prove to be common to other countries? It is, indeed, no new criticism of the French School, the acknowledged leader of the world in this matter, to say that the circumstances under which the French national collections were put together have led it sometimes to consider the isolated document rather to the exclusion of that record which forms only a single link in a long chain.
We are led, therefore, to inquire how far certain generalisations, based on the character of our existing English records, maybe applied as criteria to the treatment of those records which are accumulating in our own time in England and perhaps in other countries.
A record, if we may venture here to give definition to a loosely-used word, is a document drawn up, or at any rate made use of, in the course of an administrative process, of which itself forms a part, and subsequently preserved in his own custody for his own reference by the administrator concerned or his successors. The process and the administration may be as important or unimportant as you please; the result may be the Rolls of Chancery or the deed-box of a manor: the essential features are the same in both cases—the administrative origin, the administrative reason for preservation, the preservation in administrative custody: so also are the results the same from the point of view of the subsequent 'ologist—the two priceless qualities of authenticity and impartiality; the first proceeding from the fact that the records have been always in custody,[33] and in a certain relationship one with another, the second derived from the fact that they were not drawn up for the information of posterity,[34] and, therefore, have no bias to one side or the other of posterity's problems. Any number of interesting instances[35] might be adduced from the records of the past, both of the value of these qualities and of the ease with which they may be flawed; but let us here leave for the time consideration of the records the past has bequeathed to us and inquire how far the qualities which, with all its historical faults, it gave us in most of its documents are going to be found by our descendants in those we leave to them. The unprecedented mass of documents which the various executive departments must have accumulated during the war may well frighten us into a serious consideration of this subject at the present moment.
[33] The licence of high officials has sometimes violated this, a practice much to be deprecated. I refer to this again below.
[34] This fact may, of course, lead in ignorant times, such as was the early nineteenth century, to destruction.
[35] A well-known case is the volume, belonging to the records of the Master of the Revels, which, if it is genuine, dates one of Shakespeare's plays: unfortunately it was for a considerable time out of official custody, and doubts have been cast on the authenticity of the most important page.